Some information from a Yanukovych stronghold sounds hopeful. It looks like a couple of local police in Dnieper-Petrovsk were arrested the other day for selling 13-15 year old girls into the sex slave trade. These girls ended up in Moscow. This sort of thing is a scandal in this area of the world but they might just as well have ended up in Japan, Western Europe or the US.
These guys were nabbed though and 19 of the girls were returned to their families. (I am not sure if that is all of them.) The thing that may end up being the second most significant thing about this is that the families had lodged complaints with local police officials but they said the complaints were ignored. The fact that something has now been done about and these guys nabbed could mean that the stranglehold on at least this area by corrupt interests has cracked or is being broken. If this is true, that would be very good news and a testament to the election of Yuschenko. I hope this is what it means.
There seems to be no mention of this on the usual Ukrainian mass media internet sites. Piskun's GenProkuratura site has nothing on it.
ReplyDeleteDnipropetrovsk is quite spectacular for the big names that come from there. Dnipropetrovsk was one of Yanukovitch's strongholds. Pinchuk is from there, as were Kuchma, Lazarenko, Tyhypko, Postyvoytenko.....
One would think that the Dnipropetrovsk oligarchs, politicos, and dons would do everything necessary to keep their nests clean--if only to protect their interests by not attracting attention to the place, but they haven't. The post-Soviet transition has made a mockery of social morality, values, and limits--its "guarantors" disgracefully and shamefully failed.
Maybe it will take a homegirl to clean up this crud. Yulia Tymoshenko, also from Dnipropetrovsk, is very well placed to funnel all the admin. resources needed to do these scumbags in, to the full extent of the law--Turchinov, another Dnipropetrovsk homeboy and head of the SBU, could be her point-man.